Hopper, Seurat and the study

A study is a drawing done in preparation for a finished piece, either as a sort of visual note taking exercise or as a form of practice, so that when you come to make the actual artwork, you get it right.

Studies can be used to understand the problems involved in rendering subjects and to plan the elements to be used in finished works, and written notes alongside visual images can allow the viewer to share the artist's process of getting to know the subject. In a recent post I looked at the studies made by David Reed for his paintings; his annotated drawings are central to his creative process, helping not only with the development of his ideas, they also document the creative process itself.

Sketches are typically drawn quickly to capture basic information, to rough out compositions or put down an idea before it is forgotten. Studies are more finished pieces made to get a deeper understanding of a specific aspect of the work, such as colour, tonal range, or how things are shaped, they are much more deliberate and bare a close relationship with the intended finished work. A relationship between Seurat's and Edward Hopper's work can help to give us a clearer idea of the difference between a study and a sketch.

The studies below for Hopper's 'Nighthawks' and 'Office at night' tell us about composition and tonal value, the light sources are all in place and shadow as an essential part of composition is clear. All that is missing is the colour.

Edward Hopper: Study for Nighthawks

Edward Hopper: Study for office at night

However with Hopper there is never a clear dividing line between the sketch and the study. In the image directly below, it is slight enough to be a sketch, but it is also a study of the main light source and the basic forms of the overall composition. 

Edward Hopper: Sketch: Nighthawks

Hopper: A sketch that has become a study of shadow and composition 

You often find in Hopper's drawings that what might start out as a sketched out idea, very soon becomes a meditation on something. In the case of the drawing above, he reminds us that in our perceived reality, shadows are just as substantial as walls and floors or seas and skies. By looking at these preparatory drawings, we can see his mind working. Each drawing works as a layer of meaning, one that can help you to think about how Hopper's visual language creates meaning for you as an individual. 

This is why his painting are things you can come back to over and over again, because each time you do, you can sense another layer of material thinking. You might visit his work and become fascinated by the underlying geometry of forms, then at another time the way he composes uses mass, by using forms that push themselves across his two dimensional surfaces as if they were tectonic plates. Light and shadow are for Hopper key signifiers, they allow exterior and interior spaces to interpenetrate each other and help to build an emotional world for his people to inhabit. Placement is vital, not just in terms of geometrical relationships but in terms of emotional presence. Each human figure occupying a solid space that says 'I'm here' and yet at the same time they are placed with such internal firmness that although a body position may indicate awareness of others, their internal world seems to be wrapped up in themselves. In a Hopper you get a sense that although others are in the room, and even if it appears that they might be speaking to each other, they are not really listening. This is where hopper's layers begin to kick in, as it is at this point that he offers us a view of the human condition. One whereby we know, no matter how hard we try, we can never know what others are thinking of us and that there are moments when we realise that everything is staged. His painting are staged by going through a process of being sketched and then these sketches become studies, studies that are really rehearsals, in the same way that each encounter we have with others in life, can become a rehearsal for the performance of who we think we are.

Seurat:: Young Woman: study for 'Un Dimanche à la Grande Jatte'

The Kröller-Müller Museum has within its collection one of Seurat's charcoal studies of a young woman, that he used to think about the essence of someone. He tries to sum up the presence of this young woman in the simplest terms possible, she is reduced and yet not reduced, to a mass, a mass that is also as you look at it dissolving back into the paper surface that it is constructed within. There is something eerily beautiful about this image. It is definitely not a sketch, it is a study of the human condition. 

The people in Seurat's painting are 'on parade' they are not just out for a stroll in the park, they are presenting images of themselves that they wish others to see. Roles are again being played out, but Seurat visualises these roles in a different way to Hopper. He senses that the roles are ephemeral, that beneath the posing and fashion lies something much more fundamental. He is like Hopper seeking the frozen moment when we become aware that the curved arc of a dog's tail, is as important to an experience as the shadow of a tree or the shape of a hat, but at the same time what is captured in that frozen moment, is a reminder of the insubstantial nature of everything. It is as if the clouds we watch were to one day form themselves into a vision of a day in our life, a moment that would be gone as soon as it arrived. 

We can date both Hopper and Seurat's images by examining the clothes people wear. But we are not time bound by these details. Just as we are not time bound by the details of clothing carved into a Egyptian statue, in all these cases we are overpowered by the timelessness of the image. Seurat's seated figures are always seated, their forms are emanations that flow out of the shadows they sit within. 

Like Hopper, Seurat also produces studies of the space he is going to people with figures. He probably went to the park early in the morning when long shadows are cast by the rising sun, a time when a lone dog was let out to exercise. The shadows help him to think about structure and the relationship between light, mass and space. Shadows hold for all artists some sort of wonderment, they impose themselves on the visual field, with the same force as the objects that cast them. The insubstantial ghost of an object which is its shadow, being in perception as solid as a rock. 

Seurat's trees are like ghosts of trees, his monkey is the ghost of a monkey, or one seen through the early morning mist. All of the information Seurat was deriving from these drawings will be brought together with his colour studies in his monumental painting 'Un Dimanche à la Grande Jatte'. However for myself, as someone who holds drawing as central to the way I try to understand the world, it is the studies on paper that move me far more than the final painting. 

If you look closely at Seurat's drawing of a monkey above, you can see a texture formed partly by the ridged lines of the paper running through the image. This tells us that Seurat was using a laid paper. This type of paper was made by hand, using a wire sieve stretched across a rectangular mould. A papermaker would dip the mould into a vat containing a diluted pulp of fibrous material, then lift it out, tilt it to spread the pulp evenly over the sieve and, as the water drained out between the wires, shake the mould to lock the fibres together. In the process, the pattern of the sieve's wires was imparted to the paper sheet. The laid pattern itself consists of a series of wide-spaced 'chain' lines lines parallel to the shorter sides of the sheet and more narrowly spaced 'laid' lines, at right angles to them. In effect the paper sheet is a thin cast of the mould, a ghost of an activity involving workers who endured often very poor working conditions, whereby paper fibres were breathed in all through the long working day and which therefore brought on various and serious lung illnesses. These workers would also need a break on a Sunday from their hard labour, and perhaps, just one of them was out first thing in the morning walking their dog when Seurat made is first study of that space in the park that would eventually become the such a celebrated painting. 

See also:

The preparatory sketch

Composition in landscape drawing

Sensibility as structure

David Reed's Drawings

Drawing hands More thoughts on Seurat

The preparatory sketch

Some artists think it old fashioned, but it was and in many cases I believe still is, an essential tool in an artist's repertoire. The preparatory sketch allows you to think around an idea and it provides an important breathing space for the development of visual concepts that sits between the processes of initial observation and those of composition. Edward Hopper is a classic case in point. If we want to see Hopper's ideas germinating we go and look at his preparatory sketches.  In this instance, an observational drawing of a man from the back, sitting down at a bar begins an idea. We are sucked into the internal world of this lone figure and Hopper realises the potential that this small drawing has for something much larger, something that has a lot to say about the condition of human beings within a large urban metropolis. 

Observational sketches

The small observational sketches above are simple visual notes, the sort of thing any of us might make, often scribbled in a note pad while having a cup of coffee, but this image in particular gets through to Hopper and he draws it again. 

Edward Hopper sketch for the figure in the centre of Nighthawks

Hopper returns to his initial small drawings and redraws the man's back view, this time giving it more weight, solidifying the form and sitting it more firmly in a space. There is something about this figure, it begins to suck us in, as we look at it, it is facing in the same direction as us, towards the wall, but is focused on something we cant see. The hat begins to have more meaning, it is solidly on the head, but at the same time the circle of its rim indicates a rotational space that begins to revolve around the figure. 

The centre of the composition

Hopper realises that this figure has a powerful presence, one that has enough gravitas around which he can build a composition. In the drawing above you can see clearly how he is beginning to imagine an image where this figure sits in the centre, and that hat now begins to have another type of importance, not just as a compositional device but as a psychological one. It further anonymises the figure of the man, casting a shadow over him and sending him even further into himself, in effect making this man even more lonely. Once the man is established as a focal or anchor point, Hopper is able to think about how various rectangles can be made to articulate themselves around him. Finally in the actual painting the rectangle around this man will become as dark as the man himself. 

The man's interior darkness eventually pervades the entire composition, but earlier on in the development of the image his body stands out against the light. As other figures are firmed up they begin to establish relationships, a man and woman are clearly connected and they engage with the late night employee's gaze. It's a cold, rather unfocused relationship, but at least it is one that collects them together as a small group of three, the forth figure is acknowledged by no one, totally withdrawn into himself. 

The composition is almost firmed up

The final painting: Nighthawks 1942

Nighthawks was painted in 1942, a time of war in Europe, which is perhaps why I was reminded of it. In the final painting the rectangle that surrounds the central figure of the lone man has got darker, so dark in fact his figure is almost lost in its blackness. The other figures are at least lit by the glow of artificial light, even if it is a harsh cold pale lemon yellow one. 

Hopper has revealed the deep loneliness that people can feel, especially in a huge city full of millions of people. His thinking process as you can see is very formal, but he is using compositional processes that clearly reflect a deep understanding of the relationship between shape, position, colour, tonal value and their psychological impact. 

The process Hopper uses begins with a tiny sketch, perhaps done in a similar situation to the final image, perhaps a drawing done in the full light of day, but once he has spotted potential in the image, you can see him building his composition piece by piece, thinking it through, but still making changes even as he paints the final image. That darkening of the rectangle of light that surrounds his lonely figure of a man, being a final painterly decision that turns this image into a dark masterpiece, one that has lodged itself firmly into my brain ever since I first saw it in the 1960s. Now, 80 years after it was painted, in a time of post-covid and worries about war in Europe, it seems to me that Hopper's image has a particular relevance, reminding us of how easy it is to slip into isolated despair, even when surrounded by other people and it perhaps reminds us therefore to be more open to others, and to offer companionship when we feel we can. 

Hopper carried in his pocket a slightly altered quotation from Goethe. Art is..."the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me." My own interpretation of this being that our inner feeling tone creates a sensibility by which we filter out a particular view of the world and that is what I am looking for when I'm exploring the possibilities inherent in trying to depict our interoceptual understanding of ourselves. 

The original quote from Goethe states: 'The beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, re-created, molded, and reconstructed in a personal form and original manner.'

Reference: O'Doherty, Brian (1982) American Masters: The Voice and the Myth New York: Random House, p. 14.

See also:

Using viewfinders to compose an image

From perception to concept: why draw?

Wayne Thiebaud: Drawing as colour composition

Harold Speed's ideas on composition

Sketchbooks

The study

Using Viewfinders

I know that some of the artists I am aware of like to use viewfinders to help them think about composition and selection. Some of them use these with a full and deep understanding of the implications of doing this, but others don't, so I thought I'd as normal ramble around the subject and see if I can pick out some issues that might help you decide to make use of them or not. 

A typical bought viewfinder 

The advantages of working with a viewfinder when making objective drawings is that you can use them to isolate your subject matter by limiting your field of vision and cutting away your need to scan and look at areas of visual information that could otherwise distract you. They also allow you to think about aspect ratio and how that might effect the compositional needs of your selection. All useful things, but they do come with certain implications. The first one of course is the impact of the rectangle itself. We don't see in rectangles but have become used to seeing compositions within them because cameras produce rectangular images and we look through a lot of rectangular windows, paper is cut into rectangles  and our paintings are usually displayed in rectangular frames; but just because these things are familiar doesn't mean they are right or the only way to do things. 

Looking within a rectangle also changes the way we see things. Our peripheral vision is cut off, our visual scanning processes are restricted and the situation we are looking at is made far less dynamic. We have in effect captured the view in a cage or trap. 

However they can be useful, for instance the one shown above, the 'Artist’s View Catcher', is 3 1/2 inches square, with a window opening that you can adjust by using a sliding panel. Markings along the side help you set common aspect ratios linked to sizes such as 8 by 12 inches or 11 by 14 inches. The sliding panel has a small hole that you can use to judge local colour or tonal value and as the viewfinder is a neutral grey, this gives it more use value. I must admit it's much better than the ones I have used in the past made from 4 strips of paper and 4 paper clips, or old 35mm projector slide mounts but it will often cost you over £10. The cheapest I could find was Jacksons. 

35mm slide mount

There are other viewfinders that also allow you to identify local colour, and make comparisons with set tonal values, such as the Guerrilla painter composition finder. 

You match up the colour strip on the left with a local or 'seen' colour and do the same with the tonal value scale on the right. The Pixiss Grey Scale Value Finder below then takes things to extremes, you get three cards to hang round your neck. One a squared off viewfinder, another a colour wheel and the third a tonal value finder. 

Pixiss Grey Scale Value Finder

If you want to make a small drawing so that you don't have to even think about transferring what you are seeing to a sheet of separate paper, the Tom Lynch 'Secret Composition Tool' allows you to draw directly over your gridded up view, so that you can see what you are picking out. I'm not sure how it really works and it seems overly complicated to me but you never know some people must find it useful. 

The Tom Lynch 'Secret Composition Tool' 

Jackson's viewfinder is a much easier compositional tool to use. You draw directly on it with a wipe away blue marker

Jackson's viewfinder

Artists have used viewfinders for hundreds of years and they are the basis of all image transfer techniques before photography and chemical image capture. 

Van Gogh's viewfinder consisted of three wires stretched across a frame to intersect in the middle, as shown in the sketch below that he put in a letter to his brother Theo to show how he planned to use it out on the dunes.

Van Gogh

Van Gogh would copy the viewfinder grid lines onto his canvases, and they can be seen with the naked eye if you get a chance to look at an actual painting in the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, where if you search long enough you can sometimes see traces of his drawn grids between brush strokes. As he said in a letter to Theo; 

"You will have seen in my last letter the drawing grid that I told you about.  I’ve just got back from the blacksmith’s, who made iron tips to go on the stakes and corners for the grid itself. It has two long stakes, and you can attach the grid either vertically or horizontally with solid wooden pegs".

The viewfinder as Van Gogh drew it in his letter to Theo, 5th or 6th August 1882

The Gridvu viewable grid system is one of the latest and has the advantage of also having diagonal lines printed onto the viewing surface. This does make it easier to use when using a viewfinder to draw portraits.

The Gridvu

Looking at a face through the Gridvu

Of course the mobile phone has replaced a whole range of tools, we use it to record sounds, take photographs, communicate and more recently to be a drawing grid maker. 

Drawing Grid Maker app

You have probably seen the Drawing Grid Maker app used on Portrait Artist of the Year, it is a grid drawing utility program which draws a grid on top of an image which you can then use to guide you when you want to translate the image onto a canvas or onto paper. It has a very simple 5 step to use set of processes. Load a picture from your device or web browser (press and hold picture to share with Drawing Grid Maker from web browser). Set number of rows and columns. Set colour of grid. Set line width. Save the image and print it out, or display it on your monitor/tablet/phone while you draw. (It also has diagonal line settings so you can use it like the Gridvu).

Another related device sold to help artists is the perspective viewer. It is similar to the viewfinder as it is transparent, but it also comes with perspective lines already in place, so that you can link a gradually growing knowledge of perspective with what you can actually see out in the world. 

Perspective viewer.

Landscape seen through a perspective viewer 

Again I have all sorts of problems with these perspective viewers as we don't actually see in perspective. These are usually about 8 by 4 or 5 inches in size, allowing you to move between your images and your views. However I have also seen students use these very effectively, so perhaps my personal views on the matter don't really mean anything, the reality is, if it helps use it, especially if what you are trying to do is to unravel the complexities that surround how we look and how and why certain visual conventions such as perspective work. 

Most people first come across the grid system in the art room as a device for copying pictures. This video is a typical school teaching aid. 

How to copy a photograph

I still find it interesting to think about grids and so do other artists. Betty Tompkins made the drawing 'Fxxk Grid #20' in 2005.

Betty Tompkins: 'Fxxk Grid #20'

Tomkins' drawing tells us a lot about copying from photographs using a grid system. It is as an image very flat, the angle of pencil stroke has little variation because the information does not come from surfaces that change direction as they move over a three dimensional form, the tonal values sit in a very narrow range and texture is diminished because there is no direct experience of a textured surface from which to draw from. It is in fact a very 'dead' image. Although this is not Tomkins' main point, this is not the image is of a dead person, it comes from a series of images about how women are used in pornography, but the way it is made in effect 'deadens' or 'kills' the image and for myself, gives this image an added poignancy. The grid becomes a trap or cage and the very flat copying of a photograph signifies that the images of women for pornographic uses, are in effect 'flattening' or 'killing' them. The dead hand of the pornographer squeezing the life out of the image, the women 'trapped' in their situation. 

Composition using rectangular frames is about selection. You can use 4 strips of paper to find new compositions within existing images, or to focus on one area with a view to changing it so that it pops out of the rest of the image. But selection can be done by making lots of small drawings from either existing work, photographs or reality.

Torn paper strips

Sometimes torn paper is a better solution, tiny drawings on awkward shapes can be a road to invention because you are forced to reconsider the frame as an organic rather than geometric form. You can of course make your viewfinder from a torn hole.

Torn hole viewfinder

Hundreds of years have elapsed since Durer made those images about drawings using frames and grids. At the time he was reporting on things he found on his journey to Italy, devices that he regarded as important new ideas as artists struggled to draw the world more and more accurately. 

Durer

19th century Table de L'Aquarelliste (Watercolourist Table with sighting grid)

However these devices have now entered the lexicon of art itself and can become integral to the making of images. 

Using a sighting glass: Ludovico Cigoli: 1610

Cigoli's image of an artist using a sighting glass could be a drawing for a performance, I like the fact that in this case the artist is the nude subject of the image, especially as it was made at a time when it was usually naked women that were subject to the male gaze. Cigoli was fascinated by drawing devices. 

Cigoli : Two men operating an enlargement device; one man using an optical instrument, while the other draws a projection on a wall 

On the other side of this drawing which is is the British Museum collection, is another drawing explaining how the enlargement device works. This fascination with optical capture continues and contemporary artists have returned to the subject many times. 

Pia Linz 

The artist Pia Linz has taken the idea of the drawing viewfinder and decided to build one that she can work inside. The small transparent room above is in effect a three-dimensional tracing frame. She sets these transparent acrylic objects up in places where she wants to draw and she marks her drawings onto the surface from the inside where she sits working. Afterwards the drawings are sharpened up and the objects exhibited as sculpture. The process now turning full circle, the capture device becoming far more important than the process of capturing the image. 

See also:

The preparatory sketch

Composition drawing for landscape

Drawing devices

More drawing devices

The grid as a cage or trap

Point of view

Drawing as testimony 

Drawing from photographs

Notes from a drawing conference (see notes on the work of Catherine Anyango, who was making drawn images of 'last seen' surveillance footage of people that were either found dead or went missing. 

An archive of drawing machines 

The practice and science of drawing

The Practice and Science Of Drawing, by Harold Speed was a classic book of its time. Published in 1913 it set out to give a fully rounded introduction to drawing, both as an observational practice and as a means towards developing composition and expression.

Speed has some interesting observations and is very opinionated when it comes to critiquing other artists. The book reads as if it comes from another world, an age well before modernism, but you need to remember that Cubism and early abstraction were already well established in mainland Europe when it was written.

However when he gets to unpicking why he doesn’t like academic approaches to drawing he has this to say about too much precision.

‘There must be enough play between the vital parts to allow of some movement; "dither" is, I believe, the Scotch word for it. The piston must be allowed some play in the opening of the cylinder through which it passes, or it will not be able to move and show any life. And the axles of the wheels in their sockets, and, in fact, all parts of the machine where life and movement are to occur, must have this play, this "dither." It has always seemed to me that the accurately fitting engine was like a good academic drawing, in a way a perfect piece of workmanship, but lifeless. Imperfectly perfect, because there was no room left for the play of life. And to carry the simile further, if you allow too great a play between the parts, so that they fit one over the other too loosely, the engine will lose power and become a poor rickety thing. There must be the smallest amount of play that will allow of its working. And the more perfectly made the engine, the less will the amount of this "dither" be’.

The concept of a drawing having life comes up yet again, as it did in the previous post. In this case Speed comes up with the idea of ‘dither’ to explain it. However he also warns against too much ‘dither’.

I can see what he means, energetic markmaking for its own sake can become a mannerism and when it does a drawing begins to lose authenticity.

I think Speed’s book is a salutary read. It comes from a time when people could have firm convictions as to what is right and wrong about art, convictions now long denounced as outdated and obsolete in this time of post-post-modernism. 

His sections on composition like the one illustrated above, take me right back to school and those art classes whereby we had to draw out the various underlying dynamics and geometries of a painting’s structure.

Even though no longer taught (well not in most undergraduate Fine Art courses in England), it is still useful to go back and look at how an awareness of these things was achieved. I have seen so many poorly composed images or even worse images that have no conception of a relationship between surface organisation and meaning, that I personally believe it would do no harm to look again at these things, even if simply to consign these ideas to history. At least people would be able to make a decision as to why no compositional construction is needed or how their approach to constructing a figure differed from more traditional methods.

Speed himself saw his approach as being modern. He wanted to free students from the tight constrictions of the academy. He is one of the direct antecedents of the staff that now teach cutting edge contemporary practice at Goldsmiths. He indeed uses an example of student work done in classes there to illustrate a point. I went to art college nearly 60 years after this book was published, the book is now of course over 100 years old, so my art school experience should feel as out of date now to contemporary students as his did then to me. 

England was slow to take on the lessons of Modernism, but when it did it took the teaching of the Bauhaus to heart and the institution I now teach in was at the forefront of the radical change to art education when it finally happened in the 1950s and 60s. 

However I’m always worried about throwing out the baby with the bathwater and when you look back, you can always find things of interest. So why not read this book and see if there is anything in it that still makes sense to you?

Download here The Practice and Science Of Drawing, by Harold Speed 

Compare Speed's book with earlier writings that influenced him.

In particular Hogarth'sThe Analysis of Beauty  and SirJoshua Reynolds's Discourses

The further back we go the firmer in their convictions art educators become. As Reynolds states in relation to the setting up of the Royal Academy: 'The student receives at one glance the principles which many artists have spent their whole lives in ascertaining; and, satisfied with their effect, is spared the painful investigation by which they come to be known and fixed.  How many men of great natural abilities have been lost to this nation for want of these advantages?' 

Compare this situation to contemporary books on drawing practice. For instance 

'Drawing Ambiguity: Beside the Lines of Contemporary Art' published by 'Tracy' the collective name for the centre for recent drawing in 2015, has this to say about drawing; 

'A position of ambiguity, a lack of definition, is not only desirable within fine art drawing but also necessary - having the capacity to enable and sustain drawing practices.' 

See also:

Kimon Nicolaïdes and the natural way to draw

Drawing and philosophy 

The preparatory sketch

Using viewfinders to compose an image